The art critic Dave Hickey will deliver the keynote address during Convocation at the 2015 CAA Annual Conference in New York. Free and open to the public, Convocation takes place on Wednesday, February 11, from 5:30 to 7:00 PM. The event will include the presentation of the annual Awards for Distinction and be followed by the conference’s Opening Reception, to be held at the Museum of Modern Art.

Hickey is the author of several books, including Prior Convictions: Stories from the Sixties (1989), The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty (1993), Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy (1997), and, most recently, Pirates and Farmers: Essays on Taste (2013). A new book, Pagan America, will appear in 2015, and a two-volume work called Feint of Heart: Essays on Individual Artists is in preparation.

Hickey has also contributed to numerous other books, exhibition catalogues, and anthologies, as well as to a wide range of magazines, journals, and newspapers. He has lectured at museums and universities around the world and taught art theory and creative writing for twenty years at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The recipient of numerous grants and fellowships, Hickey was honored by CAA in 1994 with the Frank Jewett Mather Award for distinction in art criticism.

CAA communicated with Hickey via email this month. Here’s what he had to say.

Over the years I’ve consistently seen copies of your 1997 book Air Guitar: Essays on Art and Democracy in the studios of MFA students in New York. Why do you think the impact of this anthology has lasted so long?

I have a steady market of artists ages twenty to thirty. By the time they’re thirty and have tenure and benefits, they aren’t my fans anymore. About Air Guitar, I think it’s a willfully forgiving book that is kinda the Catcher in the Rye for young artists. Not a high recommendation.

At the CAA conference, you’ll have an audience that’s maybe a third artists, a third historians, with a few curators, critics, and art lovers thrown in for good measure. How do you plan to address this diverse crowd?

Unless this crowd has been radically balkanized in the last few years, I think we all have something in common. I could be very wrong.

What have you recently seen in contemporary art that excites or annoys you?

I’ve been a lot of things, but I can’t be a race-track tout.

CAA’s oldest member, the architectural historian James S. Ackerman, retired in 1990 but still conducts research and writes books. At age 94, he even has a website that receives regular updates on his activities. Do people in the visual artists—artists, scholars, critics, and curators—really ever retire?

If you write about art as long as I have, art becomes your language. My art language is being phased out by universities, but I will keep using it while I’m alive. I intend to win the long run.

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

Getty Foundation Celebrates Thirty Years of Philanthropy

Celebrating its thirtieth anniversary this year, the Getty Foundation is one of the most highly respected international funders of the visual arts in the world. The foundation has awarded 7,000 grants totaling more than $370 million, benefitting over 180 countries on all seven continents. It is the only foundation that funds projects that advance the understanding and preservation of the visual arts on a fully international basis. (Read more from the Getty Foundation.)

The Education of William Adams

At a recent National Endowment for the Humanties dinner for winners of the National Humanities Medal, William “Bro” Adams introduced his special guest Morgan Freeman, who could not help but laugh as he said the words, “Thanks, Bro.” What is the story behind his nickname? (Read more from Humanities.)

A recently released SEIU/Adjunct Action report called Crisis at the Boiling Point tells an important story of what’s happening in academic labor by documenting and analyzing just how much work part-time faculty are doing, when they are doing it for free, and how federal employment laws often fail to protect the contingent workforce. This report also offers recommendations and actions that faculty, students, and concerned members of the community can take to begin to reclaim our higher-education system. (Read more from Adjunct Action.)

This Job Market Season, Interview More Adjuncts

Most tenure-track and tenured faculty have tremendous empathy for the plight of adjuncts. Aside from a few “lifeboaters” here and there, the prevailing attitude in the academy is a self-aware and very correct “there but for the grace of [favorite deity], go I.” But when it comes to concrete measures to improve academic labor conditions, many ladder faculty still feel, and not without reason, like their hands are tied. (Read more from Vitae.)

Creative Exchange Launched to Drive Grassroots Projects

The Knight Foundation has teamed up with the Minnesota-based nonprofit Springboard for Arts to help American artists launch grassroots initiatives, from pop-up museums to health fairs that connect uninsured artists with doctors. The project, called Creative Exchange, gives enterprising artists access to on-call experts and free step-by-step guides to replicate previously successful programs. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

Science and Art Meet, Unveiling Mystery and Cultural Tragedy

In the last decade, art conservators—the people who protect and preserve works of art—have begun practicing complicated science. Now they can tell more stories of the secret lives of artists, the chemistry behind great works, and why many of the most famous masterpieces no longer look anything like they did when they were painted. They also discovered that one form of paint may reduce great works of modern and Impressionist art into white canvases with smudges. (Read more from Inside Science.)

The Forever Professors

The 1994 law ending mandatory retirement at age 70 for university professors substantially mitigated the problem of age discrimination within universities. But out of this law a vexing new problem has emerged: a graying—yea, whitening—professoriate. The law, which allows tenured faculty members to teach as long as they want, means professors are increasingly delaying retirement past age 70 or even choosing not to retire at all. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

Ageism in Academe

Senior faculty. It sounds like an honorific. It isn’t. It’s more a sort of stigmata. Being called “senior faculty” stigmatizes you. I’m called “senior faculty” quite a lot. I have been teaching journalism for thirty-three years, twenty-nine at the same college. My career in academe, begun with innocent hopes and fearsome ambitions, is nearing its obvious end. I expect to be bid farewell in the style to which I have been made accustomed. (Read more from the Chronicle of Higher Education.)

CAA has signed on to this Petition to the US Copyright Office for Proposed Exemption Under 17 U.S.C. 1201 to the 1998 Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) for the use of audiovisual media by college and university students or faculty in an educational setting. The DMCA prevents users from unlocking digital media or software. Congress has allowed review of the DMCA every three years to determine whether the law is affecting legitimate use of audiovisual material. In compliance to this three-year review the US Copyright Office has requested that examples be gathered of evidence where students or faculty were stopped from including a video clip in their teaching materials because of no access to decryption codes.

Student lawyers at American University are working on gathering examples and would appreciate hearing from those CAA members who have attempted to use audiovisual material from DVDs or off the web and were prevented from doing so. Please refer to the Google Form created to gather evidence and provide an easy forum for individuals to share their stories. This information will then be sent to the US Copyright Office to demonstrate the need for an exemption for students and faculty use of locked audiovisual materials. Deadline: December 30, 2014.

We would also like to share a piece for Forbes, written by Peter Decherney, which is an interesting read about some of the technology policy issues raised by the DMCA rulemaking.

Since 1911, the College Art Association has served the individuals and institutions that make up the world’s largest professional association in the visual arts. Through its journals, standards and guidelines, resources on employment, advocacy, and its forum for exchange of creative and scholarly research at the Annual Conference, CAA supports and enhances the community in the visual arts. Today, I ask that you support all that CAA does with a gift to the Annual Fund.

As an enormously productive year comes to a close, we reflect on some highlights:

CAA hosted twenty scholars from around the world at the 102nd Annual Conference in Chicago through a Getty-sponsored travel grant program, increasing the organization’s presence globally

Seven professional-development fellowships were awarded in 2014—two in art history and five in studio art—with awardees each receiving unrestricted grants of $5,000 to help further their careers

CAA launched an enhanced membership program with new benefits and discounted membership offerings for part-time faculty and independent art historians and artists

Your contribution to the Annual Fund will enable CAA to continue this momentum well into 2015. Voluntary support from CAA members is critical to our collective advancement, and your contribution to the Annual Fund makes this important work possible.

On behalf of the artists, art historians, curators, critics, collectors, educators, and other professionals who make up CAA, I thank you for your dedication. Please give generously!

CAA invites you to help shape the future of the organization by serving on the 2015–2016 Nominating Committee. Each year, this committee nominates and interviews potential candidates for the CAA Board of Directors and selects the final slate for the membership’s vote. The candidates for the 2015–19 board election were announced on November 10, 2014.

The Board of Directors and the Nominating Committee strive to find the best candidates that represent the broad subdisciplines and practitioners represented in the membership. The current Nominating Committee will choose the new members of its own committee at its business meeting, to be held at the 2015 Annual Conference in New York in February. Once selected, all committee members must propose, in the spring, a minimum of five and a maximum of ten people for the board. Service on the committee also involves conducting telephone interviews with candidates during the summer and meeting in fall 2015 in New York to select the final board slate. Finally, all Nominating Committee members attend their next business meeting, at the 2016 Annual Conference in Washington, DC, to select the succeeding committee.

Nominations and self-nominations should include a brief statement of interest and a 3–4 page condensed CV. Please email a statement and your CV as Word attachments, with the subject line “2015–2016 Nominating Committee,” to the attention of Charles A. Wright, CAA vice president for committees, care of Vanessa Jalet, CAA executive liaison. Deadline: December 19, 2014.

Each week CAA News publishes summaries of eight articles, published around the web, that CAA members may find interesting and useful in their professional and creative lives.

DIY Careers: How to Get Paid for Your Art

Often the biggest unknown in launching a DIY career is accounting. Most of us who go down this road are artists of one kind or another, so we don’t necessarily bring a lot of business acumen to the venture. We know how to create but not how to monetize our creation. Of course, not everyone is interested in assigning a value to their art, but anyone who is needs to incorporate some basic business knowledge into their creative endeavor. (Read more from Vitae.)

How Do Award-Winning Artists Spend Their Prize Money

The modern artist faces a conundrum: good work needs time and space, imaginative and physical. But making work also costs money; studios and materials don’t come cheap, and even aesthetes have to eat. So you get a job that pays … then you don’t have the time—or headspace—to make the work. We hear about the super-successful celebrity artists who make a fortune, but they are the minority. For emerging artists, making work and making ends meet is rarely easy. (Read more from the Independent.)

Full Ninth Circuit to Review California Resale Royalty Act En Banc

Several weeks ago, the parties to the appeal over the constitutionality of the California Resale Royalty Act briefed the question about whether the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals should hear the case, rather than a three-judge panel that would otherwise be assigned to the case. The Ninth Circuit granted the petition in late October, meaning the appeal will now go before the full court. The issue in the case is a California law that requires royalties on secondary sales of art, something that is not part of US copyright law and is more common in civil law countries as “droit de suite.” (Read more from the Art Law Report.)

If Artists Need to Know about VARA, So Do Judges

On August 11, 2010, Gasser Grunert Gallery in Manhattan sold Jomar Statkun’s painting Tubal Cain at Beggar’s Creek (2009) to an art collector for $16,000. Less a 50 percent commission, Statkun walked away with an $8,000 sale. At a party two years later, Statkun met a former employee of the gallery who told him that the gallery facilitated that sale by cropping ten inches off the painting to suit the space needs of the collector. (Read more from re:sculpt.)

How We Look When We Look at a Painting

Among the abounding fascinations of Frederick Wiseman’s National Gallery, a three-hour documentary about the museum on London’s Trafalgar Square, is a leitmotif of lingering shots of solitary viewers of paintings. Looking at art may be the most unguarded action that we perform in public. We aren’t aware of performing, of course, nor do we openly watch one another doing so. Wiseman’s studies of people entranced, or stupefied, by Leonardos and Vermeers amount to a pictorial essay on self-forgetting: faces young and old, plain and fancy, each as vulnerable as that of a sleepwalker. (Read more from the New Yorker.)

At Harvard, Three Become One

Three institutions will be united under one roof when the Harvard Art Museums reopen after a six-year building project. The Renzo Piano–designed scheme on the edge of the Harvard campus doubles the museums’ combined square footage, increasing gallery space by 40 percent. But the changes at Harvard extend well beyond bricks and mortar and creating extra space to show more of its 250,000-strong art collection. (Read more from the Art Newspaper.)

On Elite Campuses, an Arts Race

Closed for six years, the Harvard Art Museums reopen after a radical overhaul by the architect Renzo Piano. He saved only the shell of the chaste, red-bricked Fogg Museum and its interior courtyard, extending it upward in sheets of glass and elegant truss work. Galleries wrap the new public space, but so do a materials lab, an art-conservation suite, and a study center, where students, faculty, and visitors can learn from the collection of 250,000 objects. (Read more from the New York Times.)

What the Midterm Elections Mean for the Arts: Summary of 2014 Election

In this year’s midterm elections, Republicans took back the Senate, kept control of the House, and won governorships in thirty-one states and counting. What does that mean for you and for us, as strong advocates of the arts and arts education? Here we break down the national, state, and local results—and their potential impact on the arts. (Read more from Americans for the Arts.)

For the 2015 Annual Conference in New York, the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee seeks established professionals to volunteer as practice interviewers for the Mock Interview Sessions. Participating as an interviewer is an excellent way to serve the field and to assist with the professional development of the next generation of artists and scholars.

In these sessions, interviewers pose as a prospective employer, speaking with individuals in a scenario similar to the Interview Hall at the conference. Each session is composed of approximately 10–15 minutes of interview questions and a quick review of the application packet, followed by 5–10 minutes of candid feedback. Whenever possible, the committee matches interviewers and interviewees based on medium or discipline.

Interested candidates must be current CAA members and prepared to give six successive twenty-minute interviews with feedback in a two-hour period on one or both of these days: Thursday, February 12, 11:00 AM–1:00 PM and 3:00–5:00 PM; and Friday, February 13, 9:00–11:00 AM and 1:00–3:00 PM. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not required to be a mock interviewer. Desired for the sessions are art historians, art educators, designers, museum-studies professionals, critics, curators, and studio artists with tenure and/or experience on a search committee. You may volunteer for one, two, three, or all four Mock Interview Sessions.

Please send your name, affiliation, position, contact information, and the days and times that you are available to Megan Koza Young, chair of the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee. Deadline: January 31, 2015.

The Mock Interview Sessions are not intended as a screening process by institutions seeking new hires.

Students and emerging professionals have the opportunity to sign up for a twenty-minute practice interview at the 2015 Annual Conference in New York. Organized by the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee, Mock Interview Sessions give participants the chance to practice their interview skills one on one with a seasoned professional, improve their effectiveness during interviews, and hone their elevator speech. Interviewers also provide candid feedback on application packets.
Mock Interview Sessions are offered free of charge; you must be a CAA member to participate. Sessions are filled by appointment only and scheduled for Thursday, February 12, 11:00 AM–1:00 PM and 3:00–5:00 PM; and Friday, February 13, 9:00–11:00 AM and 1:00–3:00 PM. Conference registration, while encouraged, is not necessary to participate.

To apply, download, complete, and send the 2015 Mock Interview Sessions Enrollment Form to Megan Koza Young, chair of the Student and Emerging Professionals Committee, by email to sepccaa@gmail.com or by mail to: 706 Webster Street, New Orleans, LA 70118. You may enroll in one twenty-minute session. Deadline: February 5, 2015.

You will be notified of your appointment day and time by email. Please bring your application packet, including cover letter, CV, and other materials related to jobs in your field. The Student and Emerging Professionals Committee will make every effort to accommodate all applicants; however, space is limited.

Onsite enrollment will be limited and first-come, first-served. Sign up in the Student and Emerging Professionals Lounge starting on Wednesday, February 11, at 4:00 PM.

Notice of 103rd Annual Business Meeting
College Art Association, February 13, 2015

The 103rd Annual Meeting of the members of the College Art Association will be held on Friday, February 13, 2015 from 5:30 to 7:00 p.m. (EST) in the Rendezvous Trianon Ballroom, 3rd Floor, Hilton New York Hotel, 1335 Avenue of the Americas, NY NY 10010. CAA’s President, DeWitt Godfrey, will preside.

Proxies

If you are unable to attend the Annual Meeting, please complete a proxy online to appoint the individuals named thereon to (i) vote, in their discretion, on such matters as may properly come before the Annual Meeting; and (ii) to vote in any and all adjournments thereof. CAA Members will be notified when the online proxy, and the ability to cast votes for directors, will be available, which will be in early January 2015. A proxy and vote must be received no later than 5:00 p.m. (EST) on Friday, February 13, 2015.

Next Meeting

The 104th Annual Meeting of the College Art Association will take place on Friday, February 5, 2016 in Washington, D. C.

The following message came from Craig Vasey, chair of the Committee on Teaching, Research, and Publications for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP).

Teaching Evaluation Survey

The Committee on Teaching, Research, and Publications is interested in determining to what degree there is consistency nationally in attitudes toward faculty teaching evaluations, in methods used for it, and in institutional practices surrounding it. We have developed a survey, and urge you to provide us information about your institution and your experience.

Without your input, we cannot effectively bring these issues into the national conversation on the quality and the future of higher education. This is not intended to be a survey only of AAUP members, but of as many faculty in higher education in the USA as we can reach. Please share this with colleagues and encourage them to participate.